Re: Improving the WHOIS format

Dwayne Henderson wrote on Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 05:26:11AM MST:
>    Pretty decent response David! Respect!
Thank you, Dwayne. Same to you!

>    You're right about 1 and 2. But from what I've seen, this happens more
>    often than not if the acronym is pronouncable, unlike IRC. Furthermore,
>    joining it together with "name" just to be easier read by machines, I
>    think, fails to address the fact that Irssi was designed for humans.
>    Now that I think about it though, wouldn't "Real name" be more
>    appropriate as it corresponds to Irssi's real_name?
What about IRC_name or IRC_real_name? Could that be a compromise between
humans and machines? Until, that is, we get our cybernetic brains.

>    By the way, dict is a tool that searches the world's most popular
>    dictionaries and has nothing to do with /usr/share/dict/words.
Ah, wasn't aware of that, thanks! That reminds me, I've been meaning to start
using surfraw [1] more.

>    I totally get how language changes over time due to popular culture and
>    what not, but we're talking about right here, right now. I'm no
>    prescriptivist either. I mean, I speak ebonics most of the time. Nah
>    mean?
Fo sho.

>    Your 1297 reference is irrelevant though. That "the soul is joined to
>    his body" is a perfectly reasonable use of "join to" - as in becoming
>    attached to something.
That's the sense that I took 'X is joined to too many channels', so I don't
see it as irrelevant. If it's because the subject in 'X is joined to too many
channels' and in the 1297 quotation it's a thing, then the next quotation uses
a person for both subject and the prepositional phrase:
>      a1382 Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.) (Douce 369(1)) (1850) Job xli. 7 Oon to
>      oon is ioyned.
So I still do not see the use of 'join' with the preposition 'to' as a misuse
in 'X is joined to too many channels'.

>    % googlecount "join us"
>    "join us": 41,400,000
>    % googlecount "join to us"
>    "join to us": 6,580
>    % googlecount "join our table"
>    "join our table": 1,110
>    % googlecount "join to our table"
>    ? "join to our table": 1
>    % googlecount "join a group"
>    "join a group": 646,000
>    % googlecount "join to a group"
>    "join to a group": 876
>    % googlecount "join a channel"
>    "join a channel": 4,300
>    % googlecount "join to a channel"
>    "join to a channel": 122
>    % googlecount "join me"
>    "join me": 3,260,000
>    % googlecount "join to me"
>    "join to me": 1,830
>    % googlecount "join yourself to me"
>    "join yourself to me": 15
>    "Everyone join to me! About Me: My name is Natasha. I'm 20 years old
>    girl who like ..."
>    Right. Next result.
I don't have googlecount (which my be a one-liner Perl script for all I know)
so I went to web browser route:
    "joins to too many": 6
    "joining to too many": 102
    "join to too many": 915
    "joined to too many": 1,850
The first hit for the last one is from the New York State Journal of
Medicine: "If the toxine acts on the cell and too many toxine molecules are
joined to too many receptors." But the real problem is thinking Google counts
are valid for this kind of thing. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

- David

[1] http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/
[2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004925.html
[3] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001837.html
[4] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001838.html
[5] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1992
[6] http://blog.veronis.fr/2005/01/web-googles-counts-faked.html

-- 
David Romano .:. [email protected]
----
"For the fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real
wisdom, being a pretence of knowing the unknown; and no one knows
whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest
evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a
disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that man knows what
he does not know?"
    -- Socrates, The Apology by Plato